LONDON: Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, demanded an apology on Friday from his Conservative counterpart after she derided claims that his upstart party now has more members than the Tories.

Farage announced on Thursday that Reform had surpassed Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives in memberships, hailing it as a “historic moment” and branding his anti-immigration party “the real opposition”. Badenoch, who has led the Tories since early November, promptly rejected the claim.

The leader of Britain’s offical opposition, after it came a distant second in July’s general election, accused Farage of “fakery”. She argued the “digital tracker” on Reform’s website showing member numbers was “coded to tick up automatically”.

“The accusations of fraud and dishonesty made against me yesterday were disgraceful,” Farage shot back. He added Reform had “opened up our systems” to several UK media outlets “in the interests of full transparency to verify that our data is correct”. “I am now demanding @KemiBadenoch apologises,” Farage said on X.

By Friday evening, the tracker on his hard-right party’s website claimed it now had around 143,000 members, an increase of more than 10,000 in recent days.

The centre-right Conservatives revealed in November that they had 131,680 members, while the governing Labour party had around 370,000 a year ago.

Reform, founded by Farage as the Brexit Party in 2018 but renamed in 2021, won just over 14 per cent of the vote in July’s general election, behind Labour on around 34pc and the Tories on nearly 24pc.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2024